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Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Reflections on one teacher's life work

I am positive that the profession of public school teaching -- and any remaining respect for that fine work -- is being destroyed right before my eyes. I simply do not understand the teachers’ passivity, nor that of everyone else.

What’s happening to public school teachers is breaking my heart, and I am so very, very grateful that my grandmother, Luella Robinson, did not live to see these times.

Mrs. Robinson graduated from Snow College in her hometown of Ephraim, Utah, and commenced to teach public school children for the rest of her life. She was an elementary school teacher for most of that time, finishing her years by teaching special ed.

This was a woman who absolutely loved children, and they loved her back. Dresser drawers in her home were filled with gifts from former students and their parents.

Since my sister and I ended up with a relatively unstable home life, we found refuge in the time we spent with our Grandma Robinson. Until we moved out-of-state, we would often spend Friday nights at her house. On the Saturday mornings, she would take us to the nearby train tracks and hold our hands as we walked up and down, balancing on the rails. Sometimes a slow train would come along and we would all wave to the operators and wait for the caboose.

Back at her little house in Sugarhouse (in Salt Lake City, Utah), she would encourage us make mud pies on her back steps and huge flour-water dough messes in her kitchen. We'd make blanket/furniture forts, swing on her willow tree’s branches, pick hollyhocks and use toothpicks to turn them into little dolls, draw and paint, read books, decorate cookies, and drink Dr. Pepper.

After she retired and we were older, if we all went shopping and there was a little child standing in line, Mrs. Robinson would approach that child and parent, say some kind words, and give the child a nickel. In those days, a nickel would buy something small that was tasty.

Luella Robinson was strongly against corporal punishment and shared her vision with other people in the world. To her, there was never (ever!) any reason to hit a child. “If a child is misbehaving," she explained, "all you need to do is get down to their eye level, place your hands on their shoulders, and look directly into their eyes as you are talking.”

I am certain that my grandmother put this same kind of love into daily practice in her classrooms during each and everyone of the years she worked. Her intelligence, grace, and skill are certain to have made a positive difference for hundreds and hundreds of children. Her life of teaching was not centered around test scores.

Maybe the ed deformers' next idea for "improving" the "effectiveness" of public school teachers will be to bring back the stocks. I expect U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan would also cheer that on.

From Wikipedia: "Stocks are devices used in the medieval times for torture, public humiliation, and corporal punishment. The stocks partially immobilized its victims and they were often exposed in a public place such as the site of a market to the scorn of those who passed by. Since the purpose was to punish offenders against the standards of conduct of the time anybody could assault, revile or aim filth at the victim."

As one observer tweeted, "U.S. media have focused too much on the Islamic nature of the Gulen movement. Real concern is its shady dealings and improprieties."

Please be aware that Gulenists have created a large number of anonymously-operated damage control websites. They started to appear a few months after publication of Greg Toppo's article in USA Today (August 2010).

The Gulen movement in recent news

On "self-righteous zealots"

"By now, the public and the press are recognizing that it is the educators who are protecting our students from self-righteous zealots." --- John Thompson

Why?

"The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything." -- Albert Einstein

The "Big Sort" system

"Under the self-segregation of the "Big Sort" system that has replaced Jim Crow, we are just as efficient in separating by class and choice." -- John Thompson

From "The Paradox of the New Elite"

"Germany still has robust protections for its workers and one of the healthiest economies in Europe. Children at age 10 are placed on different tracks, some leading to university and others to vocational school -- a closing off of opportunity that Americans would find intolerable. But it is uncontroversial because those attending vocational school often earn as much as those who attend university." -- Alexander Stille, NY Times, 10/23/2011

Stephen Krashen writes...

"The Department of Education clearly thinks that weighing the animal more frequently is more important than feeding it."

Lessons buried in the PISA report

From William J. Mathis, managing director of the National Education Policy Center, in the Washington Post:

"In a nation which sees the top 1% controlling more than 50% of the nation’s wealth and the collapse of middle class jobs, we face the specter of building a country of social, economic and educational apartheid."

WE CAN DO IT!

"... what populism is at its essence is just a determined focus on helping people be able to get out of the iron grip of the corporate power that is overwhelming our economy, our environment, energy, the media, government."

On Bill Gates' ed reform

The inferior "test-prep" agenda which bases the pedagogically fraudulent "data" standardized test scores serves as a way of diverting the concerns of working parents who hope that better test scores will lead to better job opportunities for their children. If they realized that they were being given a con job, they might consider other, more "active" forms of political and social protest than simply lobbying for more money for charter and public schools.

A thing of beauty

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The work of teachers should be...

"...the work of the attentive gardener tending these tender tendrils of humanity that constitute our future." (Jim Horn of Schools Matter)

Schools are not broken

A Keeper

Posted on the Oakland Public School Parents listserv by a member:*

As a public health nurse, I am working with a generation of young parents who were drug-exposed, who are now having children who are drug-exposed, and it's a whole new ballgame. Many who were premature and will carry some deficits for life.

There are also many other families who have several generations of all kinds of abuse, not enough to eat, violence in and out of their homes, as well as chronic exposure to pollution and nutritional deficits. And there are regular people in the same neighborhoods who are just trying to live, but are poor and can't get ahead.

And there is major grief, and continuous LOSS. So many folks have lost so many folks, people around them dying, of one thing or another, every month almost. Young people (cousins, brothers, friends) dying from violent means, the elders dying too young of chronic disease and disparities in health care, among other things.

What we know about learning and development is that stressed nervous systems CANNOT learn, and that's what we have. Children with many major stressors. Abandonment, attachment disorders, fear, post traumatic stress, sadness, inability to trust or sleep. Many children. Many.

Resulting in: Lack of impulse control, lack of executive function, difficulty in expressing and controlling emotions, difficulty in sleeping, holding still, and paying attention, not to mention following directions and prioritizing tasks.

Our teachers will (perhaps already do) need more training, support, and smaller class sizes. They need major support and help with mental health issues. We really need some kind of expanded vocational track for those who can't perform even at the community college level.

We can't expect teachers to undo years and years of living. The availability of universal preschool would help. Sometimes a classroom is the first kindly, safe, structured, stimulating environment a child encounters.

Wise insights such as these are never uttered by people like Eli Broad, Joel Klein, Michelle Rhee, Arne Duncan, Joe Williams, or any others who are of this type of school reform ilk. And this is why I know for certain that they just don't "get it." Maybe they don’t want to, OR maybe they don’t care.

* Thank you, B.R.

What Children Need

"Our current educational approach — and the testing that is driving it — is completely at odds with what scientists understand about how children develop during the elementary school years and has led to a curriculum that is strangling children and teachers alike.

…Simply put, what children need to do in elementary school is not to cram for high school or college, but to develop ways of thinking and behaving that will lead to valuable knowledge and skills later on."

Please read this!

Feed the Primate

perimeterprimate@yahoo.com

The Obama Trojan Horse

Fiorillo's got it right and Reed saw it coming long ago (and here). Now we know why Duncan has been perfectly happy to hand over control of the future of U.S. public education to CEO billionaires like Gates, Broad, Bloomberg, and the Waltons. Sorry to pop the bubble.